Gawker Loses Its Unbelievable Traffic Machine

Neetzan Zimmerman is leaving Gawker Media to work at social media startup Whisper.

Zimmerman has what we in the blogging game call the “pageview gene.”*

He generates an insane amount of traffic. How insane, you ask? Well, for Gawker.com he was 99% of the site’s uniques.

For Gawker Media at large, he was equally impressive. Using Gawker’s publicly posted traffic for its writers, we put together the following comparison of Gawker, Gizmodo, and Lifehacker.

In October, Zimmerman alone had more unique visits than Gizmodo or Lifehacker.

His departure will leave a big hole in Gawker Media, but the company has 106 million monthly visits, so it will survive just fine.

Facebook Grows Stronger In The U.S.

Facebook may have some product issues to deal with, but for right now, it is stronger than ever. The latest data from Pew (.PDF) shows that Facebook is used by 71% of U.S. adults, which is up from 67% a year ago.

This growth is impressive when you consider that it was already hugely popular, and that there are a lot of other social networks out there. In fact, the only social network that gained a bigger percentage of new users was Pinterest and it just barely outpaced Facebook.

Facebook may have some product issues to deal with, but for right now, it is stronger than ever. The latest data from Pew (.PDF) shows that Facebook is used by 71% of U.S. adults, which is up from 67% a year ago.

This growth is impressive when you consider that it was already hugely popular, and that there are a lot of other social networks out there. In fact, the only social network that gained a bigger percentage of new users was Pinterest and it just barely outpaced Facebook.